LAMY Expands Storage Infrastructure

"The new storage infrastructure, comprising ETERNUS DX systems and DataCore SANsymphony, has allowed us to significantly improve redundancy. Transferring data from one data center to another is now an entirely automated process that takes a matter of seconds."

Albin Schänzle,
Process & IT Management, C. Josef Lamy GmbH

The customer

The LAMY brand is synonymous with premium quality writing instruments both within its native Germany and internationally. C. Josef Lamy GmbH, which is based near Heidelberg, has been an independent family company for over 80 years. The LAMY brand was established in 1952 with the innovative Lamy 27 fountain pen. Since the sixties, the company has been known for its distinctive “Lamy design”. Today, the company, which produces over six million writing instruments every year and has an annual turnover of over €50 million, is not only the market leader within Germany, but also counts among the German designer brands that hold a special position within the global market.

The challenge

Lamy had already invested heavily in the development of a virtualized server and client infrastructure, helping it to increase the flexibility of its IT systems while at the same time reducing energy costs and administration requirements. Lamy operates a split data center separated over two zones at the company’s Heidelberg headquarters. Previously, however, the PRIMERGY servers and ETERNUS DX storage systems had not been mirrored, but had instead simply been shared over the two zones. Two PRIMERGY RX300 servers in each zone had become responsible for delivering the performance of 170 virtualized clients (Fujitsu Zero Clients). In the event of a failure of one half of the data center, 85 clients would therefore have been left without data. The storage components themselves were not redundantly designed either. “We were then given instructions by the senior management to deliver constant IT system availability,” explains Albin Schänzle, Head of Process & IT Management at LAMY. “We therefore had to find a solution for enhancing our already highly virtualized environment.” Another objective was to improve the performance of the zero clients in use.